“You want me to do what, in front of the entire court?”
“Purify the courtyard fountain.” High Priest Aldric folded his hands, beaming like he hadn’t just delivered a death sentence.
“A small public rite. Nothing you can’t manage, Lady Caelia.”
“I fainted during the last rite.”
“Which is precisely why the Council wants to see you succeed at this one.” Aldric’s smile didn’t waver.
“Confidence must be restored. Yours, and theirs.”
Ren glanced past him to where Lucan stood near the chapel doors, arms crossed, watching her with that same hunting patience from yesterday.
“And the Grand Inquisitor will be present?”
“The Grand Inquisitor insists on it.” Aldric said it like a compliment.
“He wants to observe your control personally.”
Of course he does.
“Then I suppose I have no choice,” Ren said, and let herself be led out into the courtyard like a lamb walked calmly toward a very well-dressed slaughter.
The courtyard was already crowded by the time she reached the fountain — nobles in silk, priests in white, all of them murmuring behind gloved hands.
Ren kept her spine straight and her face serene, the way Caelia would have, while inside she catalogued every exit the way Ren always had.
“Nervous?” Lucan’s voice, low, right behind her shoulder.
“Should I be?”
“Most candidates are.” He stepped up beside her, close enough that his presence blotted out the morning sun.
“You keep surprising me, Lady Caelia.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Don’t.” His eyes stayed fixed on the fountain ahead.
“I don’t compliment things I haven’t finished investigating.”
“Comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” He nodded toward the fountain’s basin, dry and cracked, waiting for her hands.
“Begin. I’ll guide your mana so it doesn’t repeat yesterday’s chaos.”
“Guide it how?”
He didn’t answer.
He simply stepped in behind her, close enough that his chest nearly brushed her back, and set one gloved hand flat against the small of her spine.
Ren’s whole body locked.
“Relax,” he murmured, low enough only she could hear.
“This is standard practice. Physical contact helps stabilize an unruly vessel.”
“Convenient excuse.”
“Would you prefer I let your light burn the courtyard down instead?”
“Depends how bored I am.”
Something that might have been a laugh rasped low in his throat, gone before it fully formed.
“Begin, Lady Caelia.”
She lifted her hands over the basin and reached for the light.
It came fast — too fast, the way it always did, hot and desperate to escape, and she felt Lucan’s palm press firmer against her back, feeding some cold, dark pressure into her spine that should have felt like a threat and instead felt like a leash keeping her from flying apart.
“Easy,” he said.
“Slower.”
“It doesn’t listen to slower.”
“Make it.”
White-gold light spilled from her palms into the basin, and the second his dark ash-mana brushed against the edges of it through their contact, the reaction hit like a physical blow — heat and cold crashing together, an electric jolt that ripped a gasp out of both of them at once.
“What was that,” Ren hissed, biting down on the urge to yank away.
“Don’t stop.” His voice had gone tight, strained.
“Keep it steady.”
“It burns.”
“I know.” His hand pressed harder against her spine, and she felt something crack and hiss behind her — fabric, maybe, or worse.
“Keep going. Almost—”
The basin lit up gold, water blooming clean and bright, and the crowd gasped and murmured approval, and for one single second Ren thought they’d actually pulled it off.
Then Lucan made a sound behind her — sharp, controlled, but unmistakably pain — and she spun to find his glove smoking, the leather split clean across the palm, his skin beneath blackened and cracked and bleeding where her holy light had scorched clean through his corrupted mana like acid through parchment.
“Grand Inquisitor—” she started, and hated herself for how much genuine alarm bled into her voice.
“I’m fine.” He flexed the ruined hand once, studying the wound with something closer to fascination than pain.
“That’s… new.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
“I noticed.” He looked up at her, violet eyes gone dark and sharp, and there was no anger in them at all — just that same terrible, hunting curiosity from yesterday, sharpened now into something closer to hunger.
“No one’s mana has done that to me in five years, Lady Caelia.”
“I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I didn’t say you did.” He peeled the ruined glove off entirely, revealing a palm scorched black and gold at the edges, already knitting shut wrong, twisted with corrupted scar tissue.
“I said it was new.”
Around them, priests were already fussing, calling for healers, murmuring about the miracle of her restored purification — utterly oblivious to the real conversation happening two feet away from their celebration.
“You should have it looked at,” Ren said.
“I intend to.” He flexed the burned hand again, testing it, and something in his expression made her stomach twist.
“Along with everything else about you that keeps reacting like nothing I’ve ever tested before.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s an observation.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice beneath the priests’ celebratory noise.
“Ordinary holy mana doesn’t burn ash-corruption this deep. Ordinary Saintesses don’t survive a rite that nearly killed them and wake up sharper than before. You are not ordinary, Lady Caelia.”
“Maybe I’m simply talented.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound remotely convinced.
“Or maybe that grave-scent under your skin isn’t a coincidence at all.”
Ren kept her chin level, refusing to let the fear show.
“You keep circling the same accusation, Grand Inquisitor, without ever naming it.”
“I don’t name things until I’m certain.” His gaze dropped to his ruined palm, blood — black, not red — welling slow from the cracks in his skin.
“But I will be. Soon.”
He turned the burned hand over once more, watching gold light and black blood mingle at the edge of the wound like something almost beautiful, and when he looked back up at her, his mouth had curved into the ghost of a smile that didn’t reach his eyes at all.
“Enjoy the rest of your celebration, Lady Caelia,” he said quietly.
“I have some very interesting notes to write tonight.”